Educator Strategies ~
The principle art of the teacher is to awaken the joy in creation and knowledge.
April 30, 2024 @ 1300 UTC via Zoom
Polkadot Blockchain Academy tl;dr
4 Questions
What strategies look the best to you? What can we do better? Let's identify opportunities! 17:25
Filippo - It's difficult, depends on where the person you're talking to is coming from. The strategy changes. My strategy is to not bore and to simplify to the point of even losing technical meaning. It is important stoke the learners curiosity. Simple stories or personal experiences of having your funds in your custody.
Luu - As someone who is non-technical, when I joined the ecosystem there was not a lot of materials to explain the use cases. I think collecting use cases to teach around would be very useful. 23:19
James - We are teaching people new things about what their relationship with money CAN BE. What is most interesting to me is that those of us in the industry that understand the technical possibilities of changing one's relationship with money, still hold their educational beliefs that are very stuck in the past. We need to educate, while providing agency. Historic educational patterns teach humans to take commands and that is largely what people want. I want agency supporting education. We need to push each other about our concepts of education in the future. 24:26
Steve - Shares personal experience with education in his life. Providing anecdotes as how systems have affected his development. 27:33
Filippo - Speaking to the opportunities. Most people don't know what you can do with this technology. Many people are skeptical, but also quite curious. We need to start from a main problem people have and bridge into "the features". 34:26
Lucas - These are stand alone points: Target the learnings to the learner. Where is the student prospecting the ecosystem from? FOMO offsets a lot of skepticism, this is not exactly healthy. Staking rewards vs inflation adjusted inflation rewards. Know the problem before the solution. Opportunities: non-financial use cases get people's attention better, micro-payments, & supply chain. Teach people about trad-fi history & financial colonialism. 39:27
Peter - Shares that he doesn't feel a "front desk presence" - the "ecosystem as a product" is not mature enough to agree on "how this job should be done". It is quite hard to differentiate between greeters and scammers, because there generally are no greeters - and in the land of complexity intelligence and pathologies thrive. 41:45
Who is doing it best? Let's collectively compile and publish a list.
How do we actively contradict the idiom “those who can’t do, teach”? 49:23
How do we incentivize quality education? 49:23
Steve - Make the tech stack pretty! UI/UX improvements will make people excited and willing to invest. 50:21
Filippo - Educators need networks and should be building them. Core developers are almost never going to teach people, they do not have the time or the patience. The technical educator can spend the time to understand what the core developers are doing. The core developers can spend time with technical educators. These educators can patiently disseminate the information to different types of crowds. Quality education is team work among educators. People will do something and learn something because of YOU. 52:16
James - The concept of ~ core developers not having time to teach ~ is mostly true. But to solve this problem we can defer to centuries old educational techniques. Skilled artisans didn't have time to teach, so they created apprenticeship programs. A structured matching process. The most exhausting part of teaching is teaching to those who don't care. Most people that show up for an "educational web3 experience" aren't really willing to work that hard yet. If we can save the most talented educators from experiencing that, a lot more will be willing to contribute some of their time towards those educational efforts. 58:33
Lucas - We need break through the stigma of providing services as a non-formal trainer, this pathway needs to be developed. We need to figure out what training business looks like 'on chain'. It would also be useful build things in such a way that they can facilitate content creation, references, sharing and auditing. 1:01:07
Additional Notes from Sir Lucas ~ 45b.io
Learner profiles:
End users
SMBs, Entrepreneurs, Orgs
Web2, Web3 Devs
Core Blockchain devs
Strategies that work better:
Get off zero. Install a wallet, even if just a testnet.
Know about regular money.
See where crypto is at today. On 1:1 conversations, keep it practical and relatable. Listen to what preconceptions people are throwing at you and untangle them in a practical way.
Identify opportunities:
Any web3 use (?non-financial) use-cases
TradFi history and workings
Crypto has the potential to self-subsidize and facilitate value-for-value in a fluid way.
Break through the stigma of providing training services as a non-formal p2p trainer.
Find a way you're comfortable dealing with receiving online payments (taxes, etc)
Get paid for teaching/facilitating/consulting, so you can continue doing it and hire more people for your team.
Build a network of learners and helpers, ideally subsidized. Facilitate content/references sharing/auditing. (a benevolent pyramid scheme)
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